Marketing followup

[Dennis Leeuw]

Hi All,

I have found some marketing people that can help me formulate what the 
problems are and what we can do about it. In a quick consultation I 
formulated the following problems:

- The popularity of the name (not many people know the GNUstep project)
- The look and feel (NeXT interface is perceived as outdated)
- The programming language: Objective-C is not a well know language
- The history (it took a long time to get where we are)

Could people look over these and add or comment on them?

I also took the liberty to ask what could be done about the above points.

History: The reply was to not worry too much about this. When 
communicating keep telling that the problems were of the past and show 
the progress that is made in the last couple of years.

The language: This was perceived as the hardest part. Working with a 
lanuage that is not familiar to most programmers requires a lot of 
marketing. The first idea was to create a list that shows the highlights 
of the language then create documents that tell e.g. a Java programmer 
how to do things in Objective-C, and also for C programmes, C++ 
programmers etc. So an article per programming language.

The look and feel: The answer quite frankely was: programmers might not 
care, but as soon as users don't pick the app, because it looks old, 
programmers don't want to create an app. Even when I told them about the 
benefits of the interface, they insisted on a new look... well they are 
marketing people :)

Name popularity: The first idea was to change the name, so it would 
sound good. I told them that was not an option. Then they suggested the 
news items for the news sites we are already talking about.

Ideas? Comments?

Dennis

--
You must learn from the mistakes of others. You can't possibly live long 
enough to make them all yourself.
                        --- Sam Levenson